Middle Eastern Follies: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and Footnote

If you asked me to come up with the unsexiest movie title imaginable, I’d be hard-pressed to top Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. That’s the burden carried by the latest offering from Swedish director Lasse Hallström (Chocolat), an entertaining, but lightweight comedy that can’t quite decide whether it is (forgive me) fish or fowl.

Emily Blunt stars as Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, a young financial whiz who’s helping sheikh Muhammed (Amr Waked) to realize his grandiose dream project: introducing salmon fishing into the impossibly arid Middle Eastern desert. The hard-charging Harriet enlists the assistance of Dr. Alfred Jones, a prematurely fusty government fisheries expert (who publishes in anglers’ magazines) played by Ewan McGregor, who, though one of the hippest actors I’ve ever encountered, somehow keeps getting cast as squares. The skeptical Alfred explains that this insanely expensive folly will involve flooding huge swathes of the Yemeni wadi and airlifting in thousands of salmon. No matter. In love with fly-fishing, the sheikh believes it will all work out—he tells the science-minded Alfred that he must have faith. Maybe so, but things soon get out of hand. Even as Muslim terrorists work to stop the sheikh’s modernizing schemes, the British prime minister’s ruthless press secretary, Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), tries to turn the whole project into a PR coup for her boss. As if that weren’t enough, Harriet and Alfred start falling for one another, feelings complicated by the fact that he’s got a wife (Rachael Sterling) and she’s a got a handsome soldier boyfriend (Tom Mison) who’s MIA in Afghanistan.

Love and marriage, London and Yemen, fishing and politics, faith and science—these are a lot of balls for one movie to juggle. In adapting the wildly absurd political novel by Paul Torday, Hallström and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) have clearly remembered George S. Kaufman’s famous quip about the theater, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” They play it safe—meaning sentimental. Although Thomas clearly relishes the chance to portray a sociopathic politico—she devours her scenes like a fox in a henhouse—Hallström lacks the instinct for gleeful savagery that, say, Armando Iannucci brought to the Anglo-American political shenanigans in In the Loop. Indeed, Thomas’s Maxwell seems to belong in a different, far less cozy film than Harriet and Alfred.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen devotes most of its attention to the much milder tale of this odd couple’s stumbling adrift toward love. This is the kind of heartwarming material Hallström feels at home with—his last film was Dear John—and he’s aided by the unexpectedly fine chemistry between Blunt, who has a knack for revealing the warmth behind cool customers, and the perpetually underrated McGregor, who neatly charts Alfred’s metamorphosis from a larval romantic to a full-fledged lover. I don’t want to give away what happens with either their romance or the sheikh’s project, so I will say only that the ending is, in more than one sense, fishy.

If you asked me to dream up the unsexiest-sounding movie plot imaginable, I’d be hard-pressed to top the one in Footnote—it’s about the oedipal rivalry between two Talmudic scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Sounds dreary, right? Wrong. The crack Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar (Beaufort) has taken a subject that sounds dauntingly arcane and turned it into a rich, smart, extremely funny tragicomedy about fathers and sons, morality and selfishness, the old Israel and the new.

Crabby, rigorous, and devoted to routine, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is a respected philologist who has devoted his career to tracing picayune linguistic changes in old manuscripts of the Talmud. Although he prides himself on caring only about the purity of his work, he has always craved big honors. He’s tormented by the scholarly accolades bestowed on his handsome, ambitious son, Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), whose flashy, big-theory books Eliezer considers essentially unserious, the showbiz version of true Talmudic scholarship. But dad’s misery turns to joy when he learns he’s won the prestigious Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor. Finally, he’s triumphed over his son. Or has he? The answer is to be found in, yes, a footnote.

Propelled by a wittily bombastic score, the movie boasts a razor sharp script (it won Best Screenplay at Cannes last May), some sly set-pieces (including a comic tour de force in a university meeting room), and superlative performances by Ashkenazi, one of Israel’s great leading men, and Bar-Aba, a well-known comedian whose turn as Eliezer is at once realistic and as arrestingly weird as a stunt by Andy Kaufman. Directed with great verve by Cedar, a big talent whose own father actually did win the Israel Prize, Footnote reminds us that the most universal movies aren’t those that proclaim their universality. They’re the ones that stay anchored in a particular time and place.